UnicaZürn build their long, ceaselessly evolving musical compositions through a process of improvisation followed by careful editing and processing. Their music, drawn from subconscious associations while recording, is frequently aquatic or oceanic in overall mood and texture. Knight has spent most of his life living on the banks of the Thames while Thrower resides on the East Sussex coast, and their musical flights of imagination tend toward rolling river dynamics and the open seas of synthesised sound.

For UnicaZürn, tidal imagery, oceanic forms and the slow rhythms of coastal water are a recurring structural presence, with strong associations of rootlessness, of being far away from home, a stranger in a strange land. The inability of human lungs to breathe water endows rivers and seas with a special poetics: a boundary between two different but inter-related states. On the one hand, solidity, clarity, definition; on the other, fluidity, uncertainty, dissolution. The sense of a threshold between opposites gives rise to an elusive otherness, suggesting a portal through which the everyday world can be escaped. Death under the water, the survivors of a lost kingdom clinging to the rocks of an unfamiliar island, a coastal boat ride into deepest abstraction, a deserted beach expressing a world outside reality.

A sexual frisson too: a hovering at the brink, poised at the turbulent edge of pleasure, swept away into oblivion. Do we head toward the sea when we want to escape? And at the coastline, do we walk to the edge because we want to jump, or be swept away by an unexpected wave? There’s a darkness in the sea, even if illuminated by the most dazzling sunshine. Open horizons shows the clutter of our lives to be transient, and as we look to the sea we feel a dizzying sense of the eternal. Aquatic sensibility, oceanic timescales: the action of the salt sea beating on the shore. Each grain of sand a rock smashed to dust. Beaches are cosmic, elemental. They are images of time.

UnicaZürn’s core instrumentation blends analogue synthesiser, mellotron and electric piano with electric guitar and clarinet. Both Thrower and Knight draw upon their love and wide experience of of electronic music, from the outer shores of Stockhausen to the outer spaceways of Tangerine Dream. In addition, Knight is reknowned for his pioneering multi-textured fretwork with Danielle Dax and his ambient guitar settings for Lydia Lunch, while Thrower’s reed playing provided a distinctive melancholy in Coil and emerged as electro-acoustic texture in Cyclobe.

The title “Pale Salt Seam��? is drawn from the poem "Night-Song of the Andalusian Sailors" by Federico García Lorca. Parts of “Pale Salt Seam��? were recorded live at the Ironmongers Row Baths on 2nd March 2013.

Reviews:

The International Times (UK):

Unicazurn’s new album TRANSPANDOREM announces itself with both an umlaut and sounds of uncanny arrival, as if a vast astral craft was seeking earthly location, changing the ground as it lands. As harsh winds accompany this embodiment of aural conquest, an altogether different and less enchanting air is brought into being. In these opening moments the musicians behind this intricate music making are teaching the mind what to hear. Made of two electronic compositions, the first BREATHE THE SNAKE encourages the listener to inhale not only the essence of a sound driven serpent rising and settling through this mix of aural alchemy, but also the separate powers and tensions behind its very creation. With Stephen Thrower on keyboards, saxophone, string machine and treated woodwinds and David Knight on guitar, synths and organ, shamanism crests and coarses its way, free of storms, to the ear.

Touch’s beautiful vinyl package makes this album a totemistic object in itself, evident in Jon Wozencroft’s striking cover image of suffering leaves and wheat, and the shimmering density of Breathe the Snake enables us to conjure a kind of coruscation and virus affecting the landscape of sense. Musical Duos have always been some of the most effective ways to get new music across from the days of Parisian Chanson in the 1920’s with voice and piano, through to the exuberant dalliances of The Associates or Yello, but here Knight and Thrower prove themselves to be expert soundscapists of the highest order. Indeed, music can be said to be the highest of all the forms in terms of what it is able to do, making those who make it, virtual Druids of reflex and interconnection. Magicians of any stamp and sort are the true artists of change. I would go as far as to call them the shapers and controllers of space, affecting the immediate destiny of the moment by changing the air around us. Here, in these two pieces of music, a sense of sculpture and structure combines with the spread and flow of the ‘sound-paint,’ allowing us to release the snake Unicazurn would have us summon and watch as its ensuing trail scars and re-fissures the land.

Each moment of this first piece allows for transformation as the music moves and invokes its inherent reptile. The texture of the cover artwork therefore acts as a useful equivalent to what these wonderful musicians are making in and of themselves. A spell is cast, solely in terms of sound and one that guides and shapes our understanding and perception of what we are presented with. In both of the pieces of music on this album you hear echoes of every ground breaking experimental artist from Delia Darbyshire to Simon Fisher Turner and Christian Fennesz, through flickers and shades of Wendy Carlos and early examples of JM Jarre, Vangelis and John Surman and yet each is subsumed in a greater glory; an elegant and almost inspiring call for mental and physical change.

Records like this are played not to be studied but to be experienced in the same way that art and photographs are and as the piece concludes the story is left unfinished. Indeed a CD or digital version should be played on endless rotation with the limited revolutions of the record merely announcing the spiralling path to adopt.

Although individual in character, both compositions influence and reflect each other, with Knight and Thrower exploring the fringes of their own internal landscapes and worldview, while at the same time asking us to enquire at the borders of where music and sound effectively converge. There are echoes of the austerity of Rick Wright’s Sysyphus (from Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma) in both pieces, but in Breathe the Snake, the sound soon swells with distant echoes of a more acceptable sense of welcome than in that slightly formless piece from 1969. In 2017, this is music to enter into, as well as being sounds, ideas and images that will in turn, enter you. If music cannot move or transform us in some way, it is scarcely worth describing as music at all. That which we can write off easily, we can no more write about in a truly useful way, than the worst kind of moral or political transgression. On this sublimely accomplished record and in these two compositions that ripple with a range of suggested ideas and intentions we have something ambient and ethereal that we can, in a very real way, hold onto.

Side Two’s PALE SALT SEAM, is the calmer of the two pieces, and extends the strictures of ambience with a delightfully mesmeric quality. By summoning Terry Riley at his most primal, its String machine workings produce a virtual factory of reflection, as if the density of Side One of the record had found its solution or balm. While falling into the areas of experimentation, improvisation and electronica, covered by magazines like WIRED (and even the outer pages of PROG), both musical statements extend the supplied remits as to where this music can go and more importantly, how it can get there. This is because, like the best line in Pinter, something else is suggested beneath. By fashioning their own world in a genre that is already about creating effective alternatives, this particular duo are rearranging the surface of sound. They are using the musical equivalent of ambiguities usually found in drama to enthral and enrapture. This is a piece of vinyl that rises across and indeed through technology to make its own claim on the need for reformation. This lofty statement stems from how Unicazurn seem to me to have fashioned their own unique sound from recognisable elements as well as creating an implied visual gallery. The name of the band and of the music it produces, conjures echoes of place, affiliation and states of being. As a combined approach and system, Unicazurn offers a reason to experience and imagine the new, as well as providing a useful signpost through sound. Listen if you are interested in joining with the musicians to compose an end product together, not in the same way that Brian Eno talks, or talked about generative music at the start of the century, but in the almost standard way of combining title with sound to create a new and ever evolving idea. Eno’s most affecting album title in my opinion is and will always be, Another Green World. Unicazurn take you to one of their own making and imagining. They even go as far as to provide climate and scenery. Now it is you who must people the plain.

We who are pale must work with the salt forces within us to merge and seek congress; Man meats his new world in this musical/magical seam. [David Erdos]

freq (UK):

Sometimes, the press releases just absolutely nail it and I hate it when they do. This latest release from the band that fell from the belly of The Amal Gamal Ensemble came with a description that’s clearly trying to ruin my review before it’s even got going. It has a little handwritten note from Dave Knight who, alongside Cyclobe’s Stephen Thrower, makes up the ever-impressive UnicaZürn; Dave hopes that I like this album and I really do; it’ll be in my lists of 2017, no question, but it does feel a little like drowning.

The press release steals a lot of the words I’d have used anyway. It does, it does; I’m not just being lazy (that “just��? is as important as the one Genesis sings at the end of TG‘s “Six Six Sixties��?). It’s not my fault; they’ve stolen all the words: oceanic, coastal, uncertainty, dissolution, fluidity.

spreading out like bacteria on substrate, there are micro-patterns of detail and a gentle fuzzing
The record consists of two slow and tidal passages, which ebb and flow and pull you deeper into them. You can just listen casually, of course, but you probably should start paying attention because, in amongst the evolving synthesizer strains, spreading out like bacteria on substrate, there are micro-patterns of detail and a gentle fuzzing of the edges, which has the result of making objects around you feel as if it’s they are slightly glowing.

Okay. I know what you’re thinking. But I hadn’t touched a vial. Not even a puff of Salvia Divinorum has touched this throat. I’m a professional; I’m all ears.

I was tired and maybe that could explain the gentle pulsing of life around the edges of this record
The night I properly listened to this, for the third time through, was cold and clear and there was a rare twenty-two degree halo around the moon; it’s probably unrelated. I was tired and maybe that could explain the gentle pulsing of life around the edges of this record. Probably, probably. The thing with UnicaZürn is that they can make you believe. Their attention to detail transcends yours and even a hardened micro-cynic like me can get caught up in the haze.

So, about that drowning.

a series of movements that can sometimes not feel like movement at all
Transpandorem feels like it would make a brilliant soundtrack to a reading of Pincher Martin, William Golding’s spiritual, beautifully bonkers meditation on life and death and eternal watery struggle. If all death is in Golding’s book then it is here too; slow, inexorable, beautiful. If that book deals with the slow decline of reality into unreality and the loss of sense between them, then so does this record. It’s a series of movements that can sometimes not feel like movement at all; that sense of looking suddenly at how far you’ve drifted along the coast when you thought you were still. [Loki]

UnicaZurn is the collaboration between Coil's Stephen Thrower and David Knight of Shock Headed Peters, Arkkon, Danielle Dax's ensemble, etc. While named for the Surrealist writer and artist, UnicaZurn is guided by sages of inner-mind music and the very British astral projections of John Dee via modular synthesis. Thrower's final contributions to Coil were on the lysergic classic Love's Secret Domain, an album that Thrower was at odds with due to its heavy focus on rhythm. His work as Cyclobe (which he conceived after parting ways with Coil in the early '90s) paralleled Coil's obsessions with hermetic knowledge and shapeshifting aesthetics. As UnicaZurn with David Knight, the two follow similar strategies but dial back to an earlier time of kosmische electronic exploration, through the patterned sequencing and charmed electronic invocations harkening toZeit-era Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze.

The Quietus (UK):

Unicazürn's are among the strongest of sonic spells. Their unrivalled transportive powers are conjured through a duality of the psychic abilities of improvisation and a studied studio craft. If their previous release, Omegapavilion, issued by The Tapeworm last Spring, took its listeners on a flight "from secret sewers to interstellar travel", then Transpandorem sets them adrift on unknown seas.

The ocean analogy is made explicit in the notes that announce the release, their first for Touch, where it suggests the tendency "toward rolling river dynamics and the open seas of synthesized sound" is due to the duo dwelling near bodies of water - David Knight on the Thames and Stephen Thrower on the Sussex coast.

Whether primed by foreknowledge of these associations or not, it would be hard to imagine anywhere other than an ocean as the sounds of 'Breathe The Snake' fill the room. Its apparent minimalism is deceptive as it casts an uncanny tidal rhythm out of phased layers of electronics. The form is so palpable as to be almost sculptural, although this doesn't stop a narrative from unfolding as traces of siren song flow over lapping electronics in constant flux.

More radiophonic than rhythmic, 'Pale Salt Seam' has small synth notes drip across the stereo field, gradually filling a sparkling pool into which we take a deep dive. Its delicate details wrap around our ears like sprays of air bubbles before Knight and Thrower bring us up to surface in a coastal cave filled with stars.

Once again, Unicazürn's strange synthesis is rendered through august audio design to take its listener on a transformational journey. Yet, on Transpandorem, the fanciful impact of this function is secondary to the sheer marvel of their large-scale sound forms. [Russel Cuzner]

Loop (Spain):

UnicaZürn is formed by David Knight (guitar, analog synthesizers) and Stephen Thrower (reeds, keyboards) in 2009.
During the 1980s Knight was a guitarist and co-songwriter with Danielle Dax, who was very influential in pop art, and contributed guitar on Shock Headed Peters. He also works as Arkkon, a solo project that focuses on electro-minimalist music.
For his part, Thrower was an eight year member in Coil, participating in the cult albums "Scatology", "Horse Rotorvator" and "Love's Secret Domain". He is currently half of the electro-psychedelic duo Cyclobe, alongwith Ossian Brown. Other solo projects include original scores for electronic films for "Hell's Ground" (2007) and "Down Terrace" (2009). Thrower with Brown recorded and pre-produced the latest album ["Lodestar", Domino, 2016] by English folk singer-songwriter Shirley Collins.
The layers of rippling sounds of the duo remind the German Kosmische Musik and its insights to Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schultz, among others.
Also involved electroacoustic vignettes of noise and dark tunes building a haunted atmosphere.[Guillermo Escudero]

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